With people's increasing demand for life quality, hygienic details become an important issue in their daily life, and this is especially notable on public lavatory facilities. In the past many public lavatory facilities must be operated manually by users. With development of infrared sensors, many manual public lavatory facilities were gradually replaced by untouched lavatory equipment. Now paper towels have been provided in many sites to enable users to dry hands after washing without dripping water everywhere. However, with increasing awareness of environmental protection and reservation, and growing consciousness of limited resources, using hand dryers to replace dispensable paper towel gradually becomes trendy.
Conventional hand dryers, such as R.O.C. patent Nos. M357271 and 579813, include an air outlet on the exterior thereof to eject air downwards to dry user's hands. The downward discharge air tends to blow drops of water from user's hands to the floor to become wet and slippery. Not only the environment looks untidy, it also creates hazardous concern to users.
R.O.C. patent No. 567822 also discloses a dryer with air discharge from two sides. Its hand dryer has multiple air outlets located at two sides of a hand drying zone to form bidirectional air discharge. Hand drying range is greater, and user's palm and back side of the hand can receive airflow simultaneously. It also has a water collection space between two walls to collect drops of water from user's hands into a water collection trough to facilitate water gathering and disposal. However, it requires regular handling of the water collection trough to empty the collected water. The water collection trough also tends to form watermarks after a prolonged period of time, or even becomes moldy or breeds bacteria. Hence it creates a troublesome sanitary issue.
To remedy the aforesaid problems, Japan publication Nos. JP9051861A and JP11018999A disclose a hand dryer equipped with a water absorbing means in the water collection trough. The water absorbing means (such as water absorbing disinfection sheet or sachet) can absorb a small amount of water collected by the hand dryer without breeding bacteria or forming watermarks in the water collection trough. However, the water absorbing means in the water collection trough has to be replaced regularly. It still cannot thoroughly resolve the water discharge problem of the hand dryer.